NEW YORK, Feb 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Human stem
cells engineered to produce renewable sources of mature,
liver-like cells can be grown and infected with malaria to test
potentially life-saving new drugs, according to researchers at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The advance comes at a time when the parasitic
mosquito-borne disease, which kills nearly 600,000 people every
year, is showing increased resistance to current treatment,
especially in Southeast Asia, according to the World Health
Organization.

The liver-like cells, or hepatocytes, in the MIT study were
manufactured from stem cells derived from donated skin and blood
samples.

The resulting cells provide a potentially replenishable
platform for testing drugs that target the early stage of
malaria, when parasites may linger and multiply in the liver for
weeks before spreading into the bloodstream.

Sangeeta Bhatia, a biomedical engineer and senior author of
the MIT report, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that the
breakthrough study not only showed that these liver-like cells
could host a malaria infection but also described a way to
mature the young cells so that an adult-like metabolism,
necessary for drug development, could be established.

The study is published in the Feb. 5 online issue of Stem
Cell Reports.

Stem cells retain the genetic makeup of their donors,
affording researchers the potential to test drugs against a
large variety of genetic types and a variety of diseases.

"This allows us to explore in depth how different diseases
affect different people, in this case malaria," Bob Palay,
chairman and CEO of Cellular Dynamics International (CDI), told
the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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